Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

We are treated to some long quotes by Lenin, the good one, the one that didn’t beat his wife and kid. The thing about Lenin is that he represents exactly the type of person that people like Webster hated: he was smart, educated, non-religious, anti-Capitalist, and Jewish (ethincally). He’s also quite the character in history. Lenin is the force of the Bolshevik revolution and an idealist willing to execute his position at nearly any cost. It’s hard to argue against Lenin aside from just disagreeing as well. He’s an idealist and moreso a true believer. So what, if anything is Webster going to do with him? Well, she’s going to just use his speeches to prove her point, what’s her point? That Bolshevism then is not Synidcalism, it is state Socialism, it is Marxism, it is Communism, in a word it is Babouvisme.” She’s arguing against something no one is saying. She quotes a twenty-line position of Lenin from one of his writings and then thinks that she’s breaking new ground by telling us t...

This chapter is titled “The Revolution of 1917;”   to which we assume our intrepid author means the Russian Revolution, the final toppling of the Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the USSR. This is the subject of the chapter, so it’s very odd that she writes the following, “ This is no the place to recount the story of the Russian Revolution, which is still too fresh in the minds of the public to need repeating…” If this is the case then why is the chapter titled this way? I have made the observation in my recounting of this book that no one really reads conspiracy books. They read the first chapter, which is also where the author has spent the most time crafting the book. The only reason to include a chapter titled “The Revolution of 1917” and then dismiss any need to actually write about that revolution is so it would seem that she did. If some hapless debunker asks, “well, what does she cover the Bolshevik Revolution?” the conspiracy believer can say, “Why yes, right here i...

The woozle effect is a method of arguing where you just place the responsibility of a piece of information on some source, then just repeatedly claim that the source said the thing. It doesn’t matter if the source said it or not because most people are not going to check and just assume that it’s true. This is Webster’s favorite conspiracy theory trick. The reader, by this point 2/3 of the way through the book, is just taking it at face value. She claims that the punishment for being an idler or objector to the syndicalist/socialist system is death, but we’ve seen no evidence for that. We have a quote, “ If a man will not work neither shall he eat!” and we are told that this is a rule that must be carried out by a Socialist state. We are given neither the source for this quote or a document which states that it is to be a rule. I’d even take one of her anti-Socialist writers saying it, but it’s just her attempt to imply that this is a thing. The attempt here is to frame Socialism a...

  “ Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers ,” Webster quotes Sorel. This is the kind of comment where we must suspect that Webster either does not understand context is ignoring it because her audience won’t care. At this point in our journey, it should be apparent that Webster’s biggest crime is in committing the informal fallacy of cherry picking. She’s looking for out-of-context soundbites that she can then twist. We can see this from her footnotes where in successive citations she jumps from pg. 320 to 321 (ok, good), then to 186, 233, 112, 101, 236, and then 234.   Sorel, Georges Sorel, is being accused of harboring anti-democracy sentiments in his support of Socialism. Sorel thinks democracy is bad because of the corruption so we should assent to whatever it is that she wants us to think his solution is: probably some kind of dictatorship. We could however do a page hop citation for nearly any book to prove any point, this is why cherry pi...

  The problem with conspiracy theories like Webster’s is that the looming danger is always just around the corner. It’s coming, and probably tomorrow; so be prepared but also be afraid. During 2020, conspiracy theorists liked to claim that the Summer of Protests was evidence of the conspiracy. It was Soros funded antifa-BLM designed to disrupt society and cause a total collapse of the government. The thing you have to ignore is that none of the conspiracy theorists predicted it, it was always a post-hoc prediction. Take some vague statement about unrest the theorist made several years ago and then pretend that it links up to that Summer. Webster makes the mistake of attempting an actual prediction. She describes “ the Great Day of Revolution.” She describes cutting the telephone/telegraph wires, smashing stores, looting, burning, and sabotaging the railways. This will prompt police and military to respond with the hope that some of them will join the revolution. Then the capital ...

  The working people of the world are vastly outclassed in conflicts by the powers that be. In US history we can look at the Coal Wars, when the US military was used to protect the interests of coal companies by literally bombing the striking miners with planes. The US diverted military resources fighting World War I to attack its own citizens. Open conflict is inadvisable in these cases. The solution to fighting for the rights of the common person is the general strike. As Webster describes it, this is a tool of the anarchist—well, one of the tools. She claims that Mermeix defines three types of general strike: “ 1) the corporative general strike of the workers, 2) the Parliamentary general strike of the Socialists, and 3) the Revolutionary General strike of the Syndicalist leaders. ” She’s going to define each of them and I assume why they are all the tool of the Illuminati/Jews. For the corporative strike, she seems to be in support, writing that it was the only method that ...